text:
Every time an American Communist or leftist dies, you can count on one thing: the New York Times will run a major obituary, and it will be misleading, incomplete, or very favorable to their life and record. The latest example of the paper's favoritism to deceased men of the far Left is Saturday's obituary of Irwin Silber, the first editor of the folk music magazine Sing Out! and a secret rather than open member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. I happen to know a great deal about Silber. My very first published article appeared in that magazine in 1955, and through the years, I had many run-ins with him and could have shed a great light on what he thought and believed.
The current editor of the magazine, who did not really know him, calls Silber "one of the architects of the folk revival." That is, in my judgment, more than inaccurate. Rather, Silber's role was to direct a growing interest in the music into very narrow Stalinist channels. As the well known folk-singer and guitar picker Happy Traum told me at the time Silber took over as editor, "It's a coup." Traum too was a leftist, but a rather moderate one and non-political, far more interested in the music and its art than narrow politics.
At the time, Silber was one of the most hard-nosed Stalinists in the American CP. The obituary tells readers that Silber left the Party "in the late 1950s." (I doubt that too. In 1957, a friend and I visited Silber at The Daily Worker, where he was an editor and writer. The CPUSA did not let non-Party members write for and edit its official paper.) Other obituaries say that he left after the famous Khrushchev Report of 1956, the first indication of a power struggle among the Soviet leadership, in which Khrushchev shocked the world Communist community with his limited and incomplete account of Stalin's crimes. The indication is that Silber, shocked at the truth of Stalin's record, left when he realized the enormity of Stalin's crimes.
What the paper does not say, nor do most of the other testimonials one can find if you Google his name, is that Silber left the Party because he believed Khrushchev had sold out Communism, and he longed for the return of the kind of staunch Marxist-Leninist leadership and system that Stalin had built and presided over. Years later, as Wikipedia's account of his life gets correct (and evidently the obit writer, William Grimes, did not consult), Silber became editor of what had become a far left paper The Guardian, and used his work there to make it the spokesmen of what Silber called a "new Communist movement," based on a favorable reevaluation of Stalin and strict Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist principles. As Wikipedia describes that movement Silber led, "these new organizations rejected the post-1956 Communist Party USA as revisionist, or anti-revolutionary, and also rejected Trotskyism and the Socialist Workers Party for its theoretical opposition to Maoism."
Silber in fact gave a keynote speech that was printed in The Guardian, which ended by echoing Stalin and actually saying something like "let the bourgeoisie tremble, as we build a new Marxist Leninist party that will crush capitalism." ( I am writing from vacation without access to my notes and files, so this is from memory.) The ruling class, much to Silber's dismay, ignored his blustering.
One other example of his outlook. When the once Communist actor and singer Yves Montand appeared in a French movie that depicted the torture of those falsely arrested as traitors during the purges in post-war Communist Czechoslovakia, based on the memoir of one of the few found guilty who was not hanged, Silber lambasted it in a review, arguing that even if it was true, it would hurt the movement if revealed.
The obit writer does not ignore Silber's one famous article: his condemnation of Bob Dylan for moving away from "protest songs" to more introspective and literary songs. Wrote Silber: "Your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self- conscious — maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion. And it's happening on stage, too. You seem to be relating to a handful of cronies behind the scenes now — rather than to the rest of us out front. Now, that's all okay — if that's the way you want it, Bob. But then you're a different Bob Dylan from the one we knew. The old one never wasted our precious time."
Dylan of course ignored Silber's put down, and Johnny Cash wrote a letter to the magazine asking them to leave Dylan alone and to let him write as he wanted. Obit writer Grimes gets another major thing wrong. He writes that "Mr. Dylan was not amused. Mr. Silber is often proposed as a possible target of the Dylan song 'Positively Fourth Street.' One line in that song goes: 'You say I let you down. You know it's not like that/If you're so hurt, why then don't you show it?'"
Did Grimes even read his own article? That line could not have been written about Silber, since Silber clearly showed Dylan how he felt. In her recent memoir about her years when she was Dylan's girlfriend, Suze Rotolo writes that "Positively Fourth Street" was about her and her sister Carla, and their hostile attitude towards him.
The song that does accurately reflect Dylan's attitude towards Silber is "Ballad of a Thin Man," which contains the following verse.
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, "Who is that man?"
You try so hard
But you don't understand
Just what you'll say
When you get home
Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
Nor does the obit write about Silber's less well-known attack on Pete Seeger and The Weavers, in which he condemned the group for singing African-American songs when the group was made up of all white singers! Silber's attack was akin to those coming decades later when black scholars argued that whites could not teach black history. His column was resented greatly at the time by Seeger and The Weavers, the preeminent left-wing group that had climbed to the top of the Hit Parade, until the blacklist hit.
Silber's attack came in this latter period, after their famous 1955 revival concert at Carnegie Hall. At the time, I was taking banjo lessons from Seeger, and I asked him how he felt about it. He responded: "Irwin isn't a musician or a folk-singer. He's a purely literary person, who has nothing else to do but write such junk." What he meant essentially is that Silber was a party apparatchik, not a true man of music and art.
Silber then produced a series of concerts for an ersatz Weavers imitation group, The Gateway Singers, that included one black woman along with three white male members. The group was virtually laughed out of Carnegie Hall by its audience, who was familiar with the real thing, and was incensed at this poor Weavers imitation. When I asked Silber about this, he told me: "Of course they're crap. I couldn't care less. I'm going to make a lot of money out of them." Such was Irwin Silber's ethics.
Finally, as editor of Sing Out!, he launched a crude attack on the folksinger Oscar Brand, who for decades has presided over WNYC's weekly folk music program, "Folksong Festival," still on the air after 65 years. Silber penned an article called "Oscar Brand Joins the Witch-Hunters," in which he condemned Brand for purportedly naming names before HUAC, which Brand never did. What Brand had done, however, was to sing what today we would call politically incorrect songs; i.e., Confederate songs from the Civil War, songs supporting America during the Cold War, etc. Brand had been a member of People's Songs, but unlike Seeger and company, was more of a Norman Thomas Socialist than a Communist. In Silber's eyes this made him a traitor. To this day, one comes across people who think Brand was an "informer" because of Silber's misleading article. Brand's reputation and employability in folk circles suffered as a result of the article.
Silber, then, had one role: the enforcer of the Communist Party line in music. One of the last articles Silber wrote for the current incarnation of the magazine he once edited, was on what would have been Paul Robeson's 100th birthday. Called "Legendary People's Artist," Silber's 1998 article reiterated every false myth about Robeson that his Stalinist brethren ever dreamed up.
Silber eulogized Robeson in a way that reads as if we were back in the late 1940s during Robeson's heyday, when the great baritone represented not only the struggle for racial equality in America, but the hopes of the Communist Left that America would follow the Soviet path to Communism. His article said less about Robeson than it revealed how little Silber had learned and the fact that he was still an unreconstructed Communist.
Just don't expect to learn any of this in the newspaper of record.
I defer to Pete Karman, who writes in a hostile tone that neither Suze Rotolo or her sister wrote that "Positively 4th Street" was about either of them. I noted that I was writing from vacation, without books or notes available. Upon returning home, I acknolwedge that he is correct. Most commentators say the song could have been about scores of different people, Suze among them. The error was not done with malice. I note that I reviewed Suze's book favorably here, and that upon reading it, I learned from a friend of hers that she liked my review a lot, and actually said it was better than many others she received, including the one in The NY Times.


text:
Health Hazard Alert - 2-Nitropropane (2-NP)
October 1980
DHHS (NIOSH) Publication Number 80-142
OSHA and NIOSH conclude that 2-nitropropane (2-NP) is a confirmed carcinogen in laboratory rats (1,2,3). In 1977, NIOSH summarized the carcinogenic potential of 2-NP in Current Intelligence Bulletin #17 (4). Since then data have been developed which reinforce and expand the original findings. As a confirmed animal carcinogen, 2-NP has the potential to cause cancer in humans. This document summarizes the cancer studies of 2-NP in laboratory animals and its toxic effects in humans. It recommends that worker exposure to 2-NP be reduced to the lowest feasible levels. The document recommends actions, procedures, and medical programs that should be used to protect workers from exposure to 2-NP.
Eula Bingham, Ph.D.
Assistant Secretary
Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Anthony Robbins, M.D.
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
The Directorate of Technical Support, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Division of Criteria Documentation and Standards Development, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), had primary responsibilities for this document. Dr. James R. Beall of the Directorate of Technical Support, OSHA, served as the project manager. Personnel from OSHA who assisted with the development of the document include: Victor Alexander, M.D., Ching-Tsen Bien, M.S., Chia Chen, Ph.D., Peter Infante, Dr. P.H., Patricia Marlow, Ph.D., and Elisa Braver, M.H.S. Personnel from NIOSH who assisted with the development of the document include: Nelson Leidel, Sc.D., Trent Lewis, Ph.D., and A. W. Thomas, B.S.
Production and Exposure
Solvent systems containing 2-NP are used in coatings (e.g., vinyl, epoxy paints, nitrocellulose, and chlorinated rubber), printing inks, and adhesives. It is also used as a solvent in food processing for fractionation of a partially saturated vegetable oil. Occupational exposure to 2-NP may occur in many industries including industrial construction and maintenance, printing (rotogravure and flexographic inks), highway maintenance (traffic markings), shipbuilding and maintenance (marine coatings), furniture, and plastic products. About 185,000 workers in the U.S. are exposed to 2-NP during its production and use. Commercial Solvents Corporation (CSC) was the only producer of 2-NP until that corporation was purchased about 5 years ago by International Minerals and Chemical Corporation (IMC). International Minerals and Chemical Corporation is now the sole producer of 2-NP. 2-Nitropropane was manufactured in a pilot plant in Peoria, Illinois, from 1940 to 1955. Since 1955, it has been manufactured in a plant in Sterlington, Louisiana. Of the estimated 30 million pounds of 2-NP produced annually, 12 million are sold domestically. The remainder is either used internally at IMC or exported. Major distributors of 2-NP, other than Commercial Solvents Corporation, include Amsco Division of Union Oil Company of California, Industrial Chemicals and Solvents Division of Ashland Chemical Company, and Thompson Hayward Chemical Company (4).
2-Nitropropane (CAS No. 000 79-46-9; RTECS No. TZ5250000) is a clear colorless liquid with a pleasant odor. The molecular formula of 2-NP is CH3CH(NO2)CH3, the molecular weight is 89.09 and the specific gravity is 0.992 (5,6). The melting point of 2-NP is -93°C, the boiling point is 118-120°C, and the solubility in water is 1.7 ml/100 ml at 25°C. 2-Nitropropane is soluble in many organic solvents including chloroform. The vapor pressure of 2-NP is 20 mm Hg at 25°C and the flash point is 103°F (39.4°C) (6). The lower flammability limit is 2.6% by volume in air (7). Its vapors may form an explosive mixture with air.
Synonyms for 2-NP include dimethyl nitromethane, iso nitropropane and nitrosopropane. Trade names for 2-NP include Ni-Par S-20TM (a commercial grade 2-NP) and NiPar S-30TM (mixtures of 1-nitropropane and 2-NP) (4).
Carcinogenicity Studies
Data from two carcinogenesis bioassay studies are available. One of these studies is completed (1,2). The other is ongoing (3). Both show the 2-NP is carcinogenic in rats. In the completed study, male Sprague-Dawley rats were exposed to 2-NP for 7 hours/day, 5 days/week for 6 months in whole body chambers (1,2). Fifty rats were exposed at 207 ppm, 50 at 27 ppm, and 50 were unexposed. Liver cancers (hepatocellular carcinoma) were observed in all 10 rats killed after 6 months of exposure at 207 ppm of 2-NP. No tumors were observed in any other animals in this study, including controls. Rats exposed at 207 ppm developed other adverse liver changes such as hepatocellular hypertrophy, hyperplasia, and necrosis after 3 months. In the second uncompleted study (3), both sexes of Sprague-Dawley rats were exposed to 2-NP vapors at 200 ppm, 100 ppm, or 25 ppm for 7 hours/day, 5 days/week for up to 6 months. Nine of 10 rats exposed for 6 months at 200 ppm and held unexposed for 6 more months had metastatic liver carcinomas. According to preliminary data male rats exposed at 100 ppm also developed liver tumors (8). At the end of 22 months no malignancies or any significant pathologic changes were observed in the livers of any of the male or female rats exposed at 25 ppm. Focal areas of hepatic cellular nodules were noted in 3 of 250 control animals and 13 of 249 exposed animals. Other microscopic observations included focal cytoplasmic vacuolization of hepatocytes and liver congestion (18).
In addition to carcinogenic changes, 2-NP causes other toxic changes in laboratory animals and in humans (1-3,9-15).
Studies of humans who were accidentally exposed to 2-NP show that brief exposure to high concentrations may be harmful. One report about two workers attributes the death of one and liver damage in both to high level exposures to 2-NP that occurred while they painted the inside of a tank (9). They had used a zinc-epoxy paint diluted with 2-NP and ethyl glycol (2-ethoxyethanol). Another report describes the deaths of four men who were working in confined spaces with paint, surface coating, a polyester based resin products containing 2-NP (15). All four workers had liver damage and destruction of hepatocytes. The authors attributed the deaths to overexposure to 2-NP but admitted that other solvents might have played a role since 2-NP was not identified by toxicological analysis (15). Continuing exposure to concentrations of 20 to 45 ppm of 2-NP caused nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, anorexia, and severe headaches in workers in one plant (12). In another instance, toxic hepatitis developed in construction workers applying epoxy resins to the walls of a nuclear power plant (13). Although the hepatitis was attributed to a known hepatotoxin, p,p'-methylenedianiline (4,4′- diaminodiphenylmethane), it could have resulted from the 2-NP that the men used to wash the epoxy resins from their skin.
Workers may not be able to detect 2-NP by its odor, even in the presence of potentially hazardous concentrations. One report states that humans cannot detect 2-NP at 83 ppm by its odor (10). Another states that 2-NP cannot be detected by its odor until the concentration is about 160 ppm (15).
In 1979, an epidemiological study of workers exposed to 2-NP was reported by the International Minerals and Chemical Corporation (16). The study included all 1,481 employees who worked at the Sterlington, Louisiana, plant between 1955 when 2-NP production began and the study cutoff date of July, 1977. The company defined the exposure of each employee in the study group as direct, indirect, or not exposed. Since formal industrial hygiene monitor of work areas was not performed until 1977, individual exposure classifications were based on job titles rather than actual exposure data. Interpretation of the study results is further hampered by several factors, including: (1) the lack of sufficient time since onset of exposure for tumor development, (2) the limited number of workers in the study with long exposures (15 years), and (3) the small number of deaths among the group studied. The authors conclude that "analysis of these data does not suggest any unusual cancer or other disease mortality pattern among this group of workers." They appropriately note, however, that "both because the cohort is mall and because the period of latency is, for most, relatively short, one cannot conclude from these data that 2-NP is non-carcinogenic in humans" (16).
There are, in addition, a number of unexplained findings with respect to cancer mortality observed among employees whom the company has classified as not exposed to 2-NP. When the mortality figures for all males, regardless of exposure category, are combined, there were 4 deaths from lymphatic cancer where only 1 was expected.
Among the total of 147 female employees there were 8 deaths from all causes compared to 2.9 expected deaths, and 4 deaths from cancer compared to 0.8 expected. Finally, the authors report that 7 deaths in the small study cohort were observed from sarcomatous cancer, which is a relatively rare form of malignancy. This number seems unusually high. However, it was not possible to generate an expected number of deaths for comparison to determine statistically if the sarcomatous cancers were in excess because they cannot be broken out in the standard method of reporting and classifying deaths. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD), used in the study, does not have a unique code for those cancers. The authors recommend that follow-up of the cohort be continued and that the data be reanalyzed periodically. The company has committed itself to a program that includes these suggestions. OSHA and NIOSH agree that the present study is inconclusive, and that it is appropriate to continue follow-up and reanalysis to confirm or to modify the observations made thus far.
2-Nitropropane should be handled in the workplace as a potential human carcinogen. OSHA's current Permissible Exposure Limit for 2-NP is 25 ppm or 90 mg/m3 (8-hour, time-weighted averages). Evidence of carcinogenicity was not considered in setting this limit. Because 2-NP has now been shown to be carcinogenic in rats, occupational exposure to it should be reduced to the lowest feasible levels. Methods of sampling for 2-NP in air include use of a sorbent tube containing Chromosorb 105 to trap organic vapors (17). Gas chromatographic and other methods for analyzing concentrations of 2-NP at levels of 300 ppb are also available (17).
To protect workers from exposure to 2-NP, there are several actions that employers, employees, and their physicians should take.
Table I contains acceptable respirators that may be used to reduce exposure to 2-NP by inhalation.
I. Employers Should:
- Inform all employees working with 2-NP, or mixtures containing 2-NP, of the possible adverse symptoms or health effects that could result from exposure to it. Provide all employees with a copy of this hazard report.
- When possible, substitute a solvent that does not contain 2-NP. Caution should be exercised in selecting a substitute for 2-NP, giving full consideration to the possible toxic effects of the replacement.
- Provide all employees with potential exposure to 2-NP with a medical monitoring program that includes work history and medical examinations with specific emphasis on liver function tests. Physicians in this program should be provided with a copy of this Health Hazard Alert.
- Provide wash or shower areas as appropriate for employees to decontaminate themselves after leaving the work area where exposure to 2-NP occurs.
- Establish where possible restricted areas for the manufacture, filling operations, use, handling or storage of 2-NP to reduce exposure of employees not directly involved with these operations. Access to these restricted areas should be limited to employees who have been properly informed of the potential hazards of 2-NP exposure and instructed in the proper control measures.
- Establish appropriate engineering controls. The most effective way to control any contaminant is the use of a closed system. Engineering controls may include the use of walk-in hoods or specific local exhaust ventilation. Due to the explosive potential of 2-NP vapor, ignition-proof ventilation systems should be selected. Suitable collectors should be used to prevent pollution of adjacent work areas.
- Provide MSHA/NIOSH-approved personal respiratory protective devices to be used as an interim measure to control the inhalation of 2-NP while engineering controls are being installed. Respiratory protective devices may be used in areas where exposure to 2-NP occurs infrequently or during emergencies. Table I contains respirators that may be used to reduce exposure to 2-NP by inhalation.
- Provide full-body clothing for protection against splashes of 2-NP. Care should be used to select appropriate protective clothes since 2-NP may dissolve or penetrate many materials (19). The protective clothing should be left at the point of exit when an employee leaves the restricted area. At the end of the work day, employees should place the protective clothing in a suitably marked and closed container for disposal or laundering. Laundry personnel should be made aware of the potential hazards from handling contaminated clothing.
II. Employees Should:
- Use the correct safety equipment and protective devices provided by the employer. Contaminated clothing should be left at the worksite and laundered by the employer as noted in I (8).
- Wash all exposed areas of the body upon leaving the restricted area.
- Report signs or symptoms of health problems to your physician. If a private physician is used, he/she should be given a copy of this Health Hazard Alert.
III. As part of the medical surveillance program presented under recommendation I-3, physicians should:
- Obtain a careful occupational and exposure history.
- Inquire about constitutional complaints including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, anorexia, and headache.
- Perform a physical examination with emphasis on the cardiovascular, renal, and hepatic systems.
- Order laboratory studies of blood, particularly for liver and kidney function, and a urinalysis with microscopic examination.
- Advise the employee of the results of the medical examination and laboratory analyses.
Maximum Exposure Concentration (or Conditions of Use) | Recommended Respirator* |
Not in excess of 1,000 ppm | Half-mask positive-pressure supplied air respirator. Full facepiece is required if eye irritation is experienced. |
Between 1,000 and 2,000 ppm | Positive-pressure supplied air respirator with full facepiece, helmet or hood. |
Over 2,000 ppm or unknown concentration | 1. Full facepiece positive-pressure self-contained breathing apparatus. 2. Full facepiece positive-pressure supplied air respirator with an auxiliary positive-pressure self-contained air supply. |
Firefighting Situations | Full facepiece positive-pressure self-contained breathing apparatus. |
Escape Situations | Any full facepiece, self-contained breathing apparatus. |
* Respirators using canisters that contain oxidation-promoting catalysts should never be used with 2-NP (19). [Return to top of table]
- Ulrich, C., Dorato, M., Ledbetter, A., Marold, B. and Ward, C. (1977). Chronic Inhalation Exposure of Rats and Rabbits to Nitromethane and 2- Nitropropane. Huntingdon Research Center, New City, N.Y., HEW/NIOSH Project No. 210-75-0039.
- Lewis, T., Ulrich, C. and Busey, W. (1979). Subchronic Inhalation Toxicity of Nitromethane and 2-Nitropropane. J. Environ. Pathol. and Toxicol., 2: 233-249.
- Coulston, F. and Benitz, K. (1978). Chronic Inhalation of 200 ppm of 2- Nitropropane in Rats. Six Month Report. Institute of Comparative and Human Toxicology, Albany Medical College, Albany, N.Y.
- Finklea, J. (1977). Current Intelligence Bulletin 17. 2-Nitropropane. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
- The Merck Index, 9th Ed. (1968). P. Stecher (Ed.), Merck and Co., Inc., Rahway, N.J., 741.
- Browning, E. (1965). Toxicity and Metabolism of Industrial Solvents, Elsevier Publishing Co., New York, 285-288.
- Monto, N. (1977). 2-Nitropropane Early Warning Report (Draft). Environmental Protection Agency.
- Benitz, K. (1979). Microscopic Changes in Liver, Lungs, Lung Hilus, Mesenteric Lymph Nodes, Spleen, Thyroid Glands and Kidneys from Male Rats Exposed to 100 ppm of 2-Nitropropane/m3 Air for 9 Months. Interim Report. Institute of Comparative and Human Toxicology, Albany Medical College, Albany, N.Y.
- Gaultier, M., Fournier, P., Gervais, P. and Sicot, C. (1964). Intoxication par le Nitropropane. Arch. Mal. Prof. Med., 25: 425-428.
- Machle, W., Scott, E. and Treon, J. (1940). The Physiological Response of Animals to Some Simple Mono Nitroparaffins and to Certain Derivatives of These Compounds. J. Ind. Hyg. and Toxicol., 22: 315-332.
- Treon, J. and Dutra, F. (1952). Physiological Response of Experimental Animals to the Vapor of 2-Nitropropane. Arch. Ind. Hyg. Occup. Med., 5: 52-61.
- Skinner, J. (1947). The Toxicity of 2-Nitropropane. Ind. Med., 16: 441- 443.
- Williams, S., Bryan, J., Burk, J. and Wolf, F. (1974). Toxic Hepatitis and Methylenedianiline. N. Engl. J. Med., 291: 1256.
- Sutton, W. (1963). Aliphatic Nitro Compound, Nitrates, Nitrites. In: Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology, 2nd Ed., F. Patty (Ed.) Vol. 2, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, N.Y., 2069-2079.
- Hine, C., Pasi, A. and Stephens, B. (1978). Fatalities Following Exposure to 2-Nitropropane. J. Occup. Med., 20: 333-337.
- Miller, M. and Temple, G. (1979). 2-NP Mortality Epidemiology Study of the Sterling, La. Employees. International Minerals and Chemical Corporation, Mundelein, Ill.
- Glaser, R. (1978). 2-Nitropropane In: NIOSH Manual of Analytical Methods, 2nd Ed., D. Taylor (Coordinator), Vol. 4, 272-1 – 272-9.
- Griffin, T., Coulston, F., and Stein, A. (1980). Chronic Inhalation Exposure of Rats to Vapors of 2-Nitropropane at 25 ppm. Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf., 4 (In press).
- The Storage and Handling of Nitropropane Solvents (1976). NP Series TDS No. 20. I.M.C. Chemical Group Inc., Technical Data Sheet, Des Plains, Ill., 1-7.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
But good things always happen to those who whine!! Yumeko happened upon an advert for Clio's Twisturn Waterproof Turnliner, I begged her shamelessly for a CP and in no time the liners were making their way to me! Fanks Capy for braving epileptic fit inducing Gmarket for us! *insert confetti pedobear*
The Twisturn liners come in 8 different shades, Urban Black (black), Club Black (grey/black with silver sparkles), Night Purple (purple), Stage Navey (navy), Urban Khaki (green), Star Silver (silver), Star Gold (gold), and Brown Earth (brown). I ended up getting Urban Khaki, Stage Navey and Night Purple.
- Cheap compared to the MUFE Aqua Liners;
- Brush tip is easy to use;
- Shimmery metallic finish;
- Longlasting, waterproof with no smudging or peeling;
- Does not irritate my eyes like the MUFE liners do; and
- It comes in green (yes that is a pro in my books);
- Colour difference not really noticeable on the eye;
- Clicking mechanism quite shoddy - either nothing comes out or a whole blob of product comes out;
- Not opaque in one swipe; and
- A bit hard to find for those outside of Asia.


text:
Apache HTTP Server Version 2.5
demultiplexes the given stream of multiplexed
connections, and writes each connection to an individual file.
When writing to files, each connection is placed into a dedicated file named after the UUID of the connection within the stream. Separate files will be created if requests and responses are found in the stream.
If an optional prefix is specified as a parameter, connections that start with the given prefix will be included. The prefix needs to fit completely within the first fragment for a successful match to occur.
[ -f input ]
[ -o output-directory ]
[ -u uuid ]
[ -h ]
[ --version ]
[prefix1 [...]]
--file, -f filename
--output-directory, -o
output-directory--uuid, -u
uuid--help, -h


text:
With Functioning Kidneys for All
The Atlantic , July 08, 2009
In February 2007, Garet Hil's 10-year-old daughter came down with what looked like the flu: a persistent fever, vomiting, dizziness, fainting. On her third trip to the pediatrician, the doctor told the family to take her to the emergency room. There, a blood test delivered frightening news: her kidneys had shut down.
"They put us in an ambulance and rushed her to a nearby hospital that had a pediatric nephrology unit, which put her on dialysis immediately," recalls Hil. "That saved her life."
Unfortunately, dialysis also threatened to take over her life. As the long-term treatment for permanent kidney failure, dialysis is a good-news/ bad-news technology. It is life-preserving, but often debilitating and demoralizing—akin to saving polio patients with iron lungs, or treating cancer with never-ending chemotherapy. Dialysis patients are prone to anemia, bloating and weight gain, low blood pressure, and infection from their catheters. They gradually lose the ability to urinate and can drink very little (not very little alcohol—very little anything). Many children on dialysis suffer from stunted growth. Dialysis does not make patients well. It simply postpones their deaths.
"Yes, it keeps us alive, but this is not what living should be like," wrote Bill "Epoman" Halcomb, the founder of the patient community at IHateDialysis.com. (Halcomb died in March 2007, after 13 years on dialysis. He was 34.) Dialysis patients typically spend three or four hours hooked up to a machine, three days a week, making work, school, or travel extremely difficult. "Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays I show up around 4:15 in the morning, and I'm on the machine by about 4:30 or so. It's about 8:00 or 8:15 when I'm out of there," Henry David, a 60-year-old Los Angeles business owner, explained to me in February. Why start well before dawn? "It's my choice, because I want to have something of a life."
The Hils wanted more than "something of a life" for their little girl, who turned out to have a rare genetic disorder called familial juvenile nephronophthisis, which causes the kidneys to develop incapacitating cysts. It has no cure, but one treatment can solve the problem for years, even decades: a kidney transplant.
Unlike dialysis patients, transplant recipients can live normal lives, with few restrictions besides the need for immunosuppressant drugs. Since getting a transplant in late May, David says, "I can eat anything I want to eat. I'll be able to travel. I don't need a nap every day. There's no comparison." Despite the high price of drugs, transplants overall cost less money—a lot less money—than long-term dialysis.
You might think that such a superior treatment would be standard. But kidneys are hard to come by. In the United States, more than 80,000 people are on the official waiting list, all hoping that someone will die in just the right circumstances and bequeath them the "gift of life." Last year, only 16,517 got transplants: 10,550 with the cadaver organs allocated through the list, and 5,967 from living donors. More than 4,000 on the list, or about 11 a day, died. And the list gets longer every year.
For those who survive long enough to get transplants, the wait routinely lasts years. The odds are particularly bad in large cities. Take the nation's largest transplant center, the University of California, San Francisco. In 2008, its surgeons did an impressive 347 kidney transplants, including 231 with organs from deceased donors. But 5,271 people are on UCSF's waiting list—meaning that, relying entirely on deceased donors, they would expect to wait an average of almost 23 years. If, like Steve Jobs, who recently got a liver transplant in Memphis, you can travel great distances on short notice, you can register all over the country. But few kidney patients are that flexible. They wait, they get sicker, and, too often, they die.
With 300 million people in the United States, the numbers shouldn't be so daunting. Eighty thousand people wouldn't even fill the Rose Bowl. Surely we could find enough kidney donors to end the list. But solving that problem demands creativity, daring, and, above all, a sense of urgency—a radical break with the fatalism fostered by dialysis culture. Kidney patients ought to command the kind of outrage that demanded a cure for AIDS. The list doesn't have to exist. It is a result not of medical necessity or economic constraints but of public ignorance, conscious policy, and complacent institutions. Too many people are suffering unnecessarily.
To end the list, we first have to give up the idea that "organ donor" means someone dead. Deceased donors are, of course, essential for hearts. But not for kidneys. And not enough people die in exactly the right way to meet the need for kidneys. The best estimate is that there are between 10,500 and 13,800 brain-dead potential organ donors each year. More than half already become donors, and not all their kidneys can be used. If every single person who died the right way became an organ donor, an optimistic estimate would be that 7,000 more kidneys a year would be available for transplant. Since the list is now increasing by 6,000 a year, that would be enough to end it—in 80 years.
And even those numbers understate the problem. Though the list is inflated with "inactive" patients who aren't healthy enough for transplants at the moment but don't want to lose their place in line, it does not include a host of others who would be good transplant candidates right away—nearly another 80,000, estimates a study published last year in the American Journal of Transplantation. "The potential need for kidneys is a lot greater than the waiting list itself," says Arthur Matas, the director of the renal-transplant service at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a past president of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.
Eighty years or 160 or merely 40. Whichever you pick, the number of deceased donors will never be enough. Any sense of urgency inevitably leads to the same conclusion: we need a lot more living donors.
Volunteering one of his kidneys was the obvious choice for Garet Hil, who wasn't about to wait years as his little girl grew ever sicker. Like most people, he knew almost nothing about kidney disease or kidney transplants before his daughter got sick. "If you'd asked me how many kidneys I had, I wouldn't have known I had two," he says. A Wharton-educated management consultant and former CEO, he soon mastered the basics. Living with a single kidney is almost exactly like living with two; the remaining kidney expands to take up the slack. (When kidneys fail, they generally fail together; barring trauma or cancer, there's not much advantage to a backup.) The main risk to the donor is the risk of any surgery. The kidney can now be removed laparoscopically, using tiny incisions and a fiber-optic camera to guide the surgeon, thus avoiding the huge abdominal slice and lengthy recovery time that used to be standard. Kidney donors don't have to be close relatives of recipients, but they do need to have the right blood type. And kidneys from living donors tend to last many years longer than kidneys from deceased donors.
Since the current transplant system extols altruism, one way to end the list would be to find more altruists. With, say, 50,000 new living donors, deceased donation could easily pick up the slack. Again, the numbers aren't that big. The Southern Baptist Convention includes 42,000 member churches; the United Methodist Church, whose Web site earlier this year featured the quote, "As United Methodists, we're life savers," counts more than 34,000 U.S. congregations. If each congregation produced just one new living donor, the waiting list would disappear. But kidney donation is a more visceral mission than mainstream religious groups want to contemplate. The only sect to adopt kidney donation as a formal cause is a tiny Australia-based group called Jesus Christians; instead of lauding them, critics point to their donations as evidence that they're a cult.
Nor has the cause attracted much secular attention. Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife. "It's not AIDS, it's not cancer," says Jack Daly, who worked on kidney-related legislation when he was counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Kidney donation is not a very sexy issue." Even uncontroversial bills sit around for years without action. "Seemingly, a member of Congress has to die to get an organ-donation-related bill to become law," Daly says. (Last year, a long-standing proposal for a medal honoring organ donors finally became the Stephanie Tubbs-Jones Gift of Life Medal Act, after the Cleveland congresswoman died of a brain aneurysm and her family donated her organs.)
Even when you're motivated, becoming a living donor is not as easy as it sounds—as Garet Hil discovered. Since he shares his daughter's A blood type, he immediately agreed to give her one of his kidneys. A fit former marine without the high blood pressure that disqualifies many potential donors, he easily passed the requisite medical and psychological tests. The transplant was scheduled for May 2007.
Then, a week before surgery, a final test returned bad news. In response to a blood transfusion she'd received in the emergency room, Hil's daughter had developed antibodies that meant she would reject his kidney. A second test confirmed the result. Worse, the three uncles who'd stepped up as substitute donors ran into the same problem. So did a "nondirected donor," a stranger who'd agreed to give a kidney to anyone the transplant center designated. "We had five donors who failed in the course of four weeks," Hil recalls.
Hil and his wife went on a campaign to find a new donor, calling every relative and friend they could think of. Finally, the 23-year-old son of one of Garet Hil's brothers proved an ideal match. The transplant was done in July 2007. Two years later, both patients are doing well.
For most families, that would be the happy end of the story. But Hil wants to make sure that when his daughter's new kidney fails in 10 or 20 years, she can get another one quickly: "When my daughter got sick and needed a transplant, I said, 'What am I going to do so that I can help her the rest of her life?'" He is by nature a problem-solver, someone intent on developing and applying analytical tools. During his search for a kidney, he saw a lot of problems. "I learned how screwed up the system was, and I said, 'I'm going to fix it,'" Hil recalls. "And that's when we launched the National Kidney Registry."
With offices in a converted colonial house on Long Island, the nonprofit registry is a modest affair—just three employees and Hil, who volunteers about 10 hours a week. Directly and indirectly (by covering the costs of computer programming and other services through Hil's consulting company), Hil and his wife have provided most of the registry's start-up funding, nearly $1 million. The organization's largest outside supporter is the Aetna Foundation, which announced a $50,000 donation in March. Along with similar organizations at a few transplant centers, the registry could shorten the waiting list by significantly increasing the number of living donations.
The National Organ Transplant Act forbids offering "valuable consideration," generally construed as cash or an equivalent quid pro quo, for an organ. But very few people are willing to give someone a kidney without getting something in return. Last year, 106 people anonymously donated kidneys to transplant centers as nondirected donors; a few more gave kidneys to people they'd met online but hadn't previously known. But almost all living donors are helping a relative or friend. Although many people call these donations "altruistic," they in fact offer donors a substantial benefit: saving someone they care about.
Thousands of people on the waiting list have someone who cares enough to give them a kidney but who has the wrong blood type or, like Hil, triggers antibodies in a "sensitized" kidney patient. "Imagine the frustration of watching your sister die of kidney failure, being willing and healthy enough to donate to her and give her back her life, but being denied the opportunity to do so because of some 'antibody issue.' Devastating," says Dorry Segev, the director of clinical research in transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins. Until recently, the only option open to these would-be donors was to give a kidney to a transplant center's waiting list in exchange for a deceased-donor kidney for their loved one. Since cadaver kidneys tend to go bad years before living-donor kidneys, it wasn't an even trade. In 2008, only 99 people in the country took it.
Over the past decade, however, a more promising trade has become possible. In its simplest form, known as "paired exchange," incompatible pairs are matched. For example, a husband with type A blood wants to give a kidney to his wife, who has type B blood. Meanwhile, a mother with type B wants to donate to her son with type A. So the mother gives to the wife, and the husband gives to the son. As originally developed at Johns Hopkins, paired exchanges involved not only swaps but simultaneous surgeries, so that no one could back out. Since the first paired exchange in 2000, the number has grown from two that year to 240 in 2008 and 591 in total. (In 2007, Congress unanimously amended the law to make paired exchanges explicitly legal—but only after the bill's original sponsor, Charlie Norwood, a Georgia congressman who'd received a lung transplant, gave the bill that all-important push. He died.)
Finding matching pairs is tricky, however, especially once you throw in the problem of sensitized recipients, who need not only the right blood type but additional antigen matches. You have to find a recipient whose incompatible donor offers what you need, and, at the same time, your donor must have exactly what that recipient needs. In his search for a kidney, Garet Hil enrolled in every existing paired-exchange program, only to discover that "my odds for getting my daughter a transplant were about 1 in 10, or 10 percent, over the next year, which was completely unacceptable."
Bartering kidneys has the same problems as bartering anything else. What each side needs has to match perfectly. "In economics, for maybe a hundred years, people have talked about why money is important—because of the difficulties of barter. The phrase that's come to signify that in economics is The trouble with barter is, you have to find a double coincidence of wants," says Alvin Roth, a Harvard economist who has designed algorithms for kidney exchanges. "When you think about regular kidney exchange, what that means is, not only do we have to want your kidney; you have to want our kidney—a double coincidence of wants." Worse, the need for simultaneous operations, requiring four operating rooms and four transplant teams, severely limits where such exchanges can be done. Paired exchange can't significantly reduce the waiting list.
Donor chains are more promising. A donor chain starts with one of those rare (but increasingly common nondirected donors, who gives to someone who has a willing but incompatible donor. That donor then gives to someone else with an incompatible donor, who gives to a third person with an incompatible donor, and so on. In theory, a chain can go on indefinitely. The surgeries don't have to be simultaneous, or even in the same place. In the March 12 New England Journal of Medicine, a group led by Michael A. Rees of the University of Toledo Medical Center and including Dorry Segev and Alvin Roth, reported on a chain of 10 kidney transplants involving six transplant centers in five states. If a donor drops out, whether for personal or medical reasons, the chain simply ends. The waiting recipient is disappointed, but still has an incompatible donor. They can join a new chain.
The bigger the pool of potential donors and recipients, the better the matches can be, a particularly important consideration for sensitized patients. Few kidney patients have as big a family network as Garet Hil's daughter. Someone with diabetes, which runs in families, or polycystic kidney disease, a relatively common genetic disorder, may have only one healthy potential donor. So the National Kidney Registry aims to build as large a pool as possible, and has already signed up 28 transplant centers, including 11 of the 20 largest. The centers enter information about patients and their willing but incompatible donors into the registry's database, making those pairs eligible for weekly "match runs" to find optimal chains.
The registry also operates as a clearinghouse for prospective nondirected donors. They first complete an online form, which screens out people with obvious disqualifying medical conditions, and get a health certificate from their doctor. Registry counselors then do phone interviews to eliminate cranks and those seeking illegal payments. Prospects who make it past the initial screening get a swab kit, originally developed for the national bone-marrow registry, so they can test their blood type and three important antigens. These steps reduce the burden on busy transplant centers, who can find dealing with prospective nondirected donors a distracting time sink.
The registry has facilitated 44 transplants since its first, on Valentine's Day 2008, including 23 in the first six months of 2009, with 42 more expected this year. More than 1,200 people have completed the online form. While most back out or are disqualified for medical reasons, notably high blood pressure or obesity, the registry so far has attracted plenty of the nondirected donors. Forty applicants have passed the initial screening and completed the swab test, and 20 have gone through full workups. Sixteen of those have already completed registry-facilitated transplants. "There are apparently a lot of people in the United States willing to donate their kidney to a stranger," says Hil.
A chain makes that gift even more appealing, since the nondirected donor helps not just one person but a whole series of patients. "It allows the generosity of nondirected donors to be multiplied over and over again. They become like a spark for a fire," says Gabriel Danovitch, the medical director of the kidney-and-pancreas transplant program at UCLA, one of the National Kidney Registry's affiliate centers. Danovitch, who admits he originally wasn't quite sure what to make of this entrepreneurial outsider, now says he has "great respect" for Hil, adding that UCLA has "had a very, very good experience" with the registry.
Donor chains represent a cultural shift in the world of transplants, away from rationing cadaver organs and toward searching for living donors, away from using whatever living donor is available and toward finding the best possible match. They also mean embracing a relatively new idea: strangers giving kidneys to strangers. Above all, chains represent a much-needed sense of urgency, a growing conviction that rewarding patients for stoically waiting their turn as their health deteriorates is unjustified and unnecessary.
But at transplant centers, that urgency is still mostly theoretical. Despite waiting lists numbering in the thousands, the 28 centers enrolled in the National Kidney Registry have listed a mere 152 incompatible pairs—so few that the registry actually has extra type A donors with no one to take their kidneys. "We've got donors right now waiting for recipients who don't know that we're out there. We could get these people transplanted immediately, and they don't know that we exist," says Hil. "Either the transplant centers haven't told them, or the transplant centers don't know" the registry has donors waiting. "It's mind-boggling."
To make chains more than a clever concept, transplant centers need to start routinely recording information on willing but incompatible donors and entering it in databases for matching. "Almost every potential donor could be a donor if our current knowledge was maximized," says UCLA's Danovitch. But once potential donors are deemed incompatible, most of them simply get lost. "We're nowhere near maximizing at the moment," he says. "We're just dipping our toes in the water, essentially, compared to what could be done."
Danovitch is surely correct that transplant centers could move many more patients off the waiting list if they put more patients and potential donors into a central registry and took full advantage of chains. But all of this mathematical ingenuity and institutional transformation can only go so far. Eventually the need for that "double coincidence of wants" limits even the most sophisticated barter chains. The most wildly optimistic estimates suggest that perhaps 15,000 patients on the waiting list have willing but incompatible donors. That leaves another 65,000 who have nothing to swap. Donor chains discriminate against people with small families, bad genetics, or sick friends.
"My sister offered, but she's diabetic. My wife offered, but she's diabetic," Henry David, the L.A. business owner, said in February. "My older son was born with hydronephrosis, which is a kinked ureter," so his kidney is only partially functioning. "I've got another son, but with the crappy genetics, I haven't asked him, because I figure he's going to have trouble down the road." For patients like David, donor chains provide only indirect help, by taking luckier people off the waiting list.
Because they deal in barter, donor chains don't require any new laws. They aren't especially controversial, just logistically tricky. People like Danovitch, who vehemently opposes financial incentives for donors, and people like Arthur Matas, who strongly supports such compensation, can all agree that swapping kidneys is a good thing. "Every one of these things that takes one person off dialysis and gives them a good functioning kidney is worth fighting for," says Matas. But if the goal is to end the waiting list, chains are a compromise that falls far short.
"This paired exchange thing—can it make the list go to zero? I don't think so," admits Hil. But, as much as he wants to help kidney patients in general, his primary goals are personal. "My daughter needs another kidney in 20 years, and I know that she has many donors," and thus plenty to barter with. "I can't solve the whole problem, but if I solve half of the problem, it's the half that's really relevant" to helping her.
The obvious solution to the problem of barter is, of course, money. Altruistic blood donors often receive freebies like movie tickets or paid vacation hours that would be illegal for kidney donors. Plasma and sperm donors routinely receive cash, as do egg donors and surrogate mothers, who get tens of thousands of dollars.. If transplant centers could pay $25,000 or $50,000 to each living kidney donor, many more people would line up to contribute.
Such payments could even save taxpayers billions of dollars. Long-term dialysis is a federal entitlement. Under a special law, Medicare covers everyone, regardless of age, who has made minimal Social Security tax payments—about 319,000 of the country's 400,000 dialysis patients. Compared with dialysis payments, every transplant from a living, unrelated donor saves an expected present value of almost $100,000 in medical costs, according to a 2003 American Journal of Transplantation article by Matas and Mark Schnitzler, an economist then at Washington University in St. Louis and now at the Saint Louis University Center for Outcomes Research.
Eliminating the waiting list would thus save taxpayers $8 billion, or $4 billion if each living donor received a lump-sum payment of $50,000.
That purely financial estimate ignores the enormous benefits for the patients' quality of life, of course. It also excludes the economic gains from returning to productive work—only about 10 percent of dialysis patients are employed even part-time—and the fiscal effects of paying taxes rather than receiving disability payments.
Registries and chains provide a model for how an above-board market in kidneys might develop, protecting the interests of both donors and recipients. Just as the National Kidney Registry initially screens nondirected altruistic donors, a central organization could do the same for prospective kidney vendors. Those who qualified would be referred to local transplant centers for full medical and psychological testing, after which they could be matched with the recipients—and possibly chains—for whom they were best suited. Unlike volunteers, vendors would not get to choose their recipients, giving everyone in need of a kidney a fair shot. Payment would come not from individual recipients but, as for the rest of the transplant process, through normal insurance (including Medicare) at standard rates.
Such proposals, of course, attract vehement opposition from people who fear that financial incentives would squeeze out unpaid donors, entice the poor into bad medical choices, or "cheapen the gift." Some volunteers would undoubtedly drop out, relieved to let someone else provide their loved one's new kidney. But real incentives, rather than token rewards, would produce a net increase in the number of transplants. Giving a kidney to a relative or friend could still speed up the process, providing an incentive to do so but relieving such donors of any sense of emotional blackmail.
A well-designed system could address the concerns about donor welfare by including educational programs, waiting periods, and follow-up care for donors, and possibly by allocating the payments over time rather than offering immediate cash. As for "cheapening" donation, Matas notes the importance of attitude. "We need to create a culture of dignity. There are many people who want to do this, and the incentive would push them over the edge," he says. "The message should be, 'We can compensate you but never repay you.'"
Outlawing payments to donors is ostensibly a way to keep the system fair, giving rich and poor an equally lousy chance of getting a kidney. But wealthier people can already more easily register at distant centers with short lists. They're also more likely to have friends and relatives who can afford the nonmedical expenses that living donation often entails, including time off from work, child care, hotel rooms, or cross-country travel. (It is legal for recipients or third parties to pay such expenses, but, unlike medical costs, they are not covered by insurance.)
Patients with enough money and the right networks have yet another option. They can go abroad, to countries where the authorities sanction or ignore payments to living donors. That's how Henry David got his new kidney.
A cousin in Canada referred him to a close friend who'd received a transplant overseas two years ago, with excellent surgical care and good results. David contacted the surgeon, sent his medical records, and after a few delays flew to Israel for the final workup and then to a country he doesn't want identified for the transplant. He saw the donor, a 31-year-old man, who stayed with two other donor friends in an adjacent hospital room, but did not talk to him. (Neither spoke the other's language.) David paid $120,000 out of pocket for the full procedure. He believes $30,000 went to the donor. Because of the shadowy, international nature of the operation, however, he cannot be sure.
Such "transplant tourism" is growing. Many of the transplants are not as medically sound as David's, and the care for living donors, even when adequate, rarely meets U.S. standards. Laparoscopic surgery is a First World luxury, as are desk jobs to which donors can safely return soon after surgery. With few protections beyond the surgeon's need to maintain a good reputation among potential donors, kidney vendors may not receive the full payments they're promised. In China (which is not where David went), organs may come not only from paid living vendors but also from executed prisoners. Transplant tourism is, in short, an ethical morass.
It is also a completely predictable byproduct of the current system, willed into being by policy makers who ignore the plight of kidney patients and by doctors who see above-board payments—and the protections of contract and malpractice law that would go with them—as pollution. Living donation is a low-risk procedure for the donor that offers life-changing rewards for the recipient. Yet the donor is the only person involved in the process who receives no compensation. "There's no reason that someone who does this should not get something substantial that will make a difference in their lives," says David. To people who like to celebrate living donors as heroes, payment seems terribly crass. But the vicarious thrill of someone else's altruism comes at a terrible cost.


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North Korea has placed a three-stage rocket on the launch pad at a new, more sophisticated facility facing the Yellow Sea. It plans to launch what it calls an earth observation satellite as early as Thursday. There are also indications the reclusive and impoverished country is preparing for a third nuclear weapons test, as well.
Satellite imagery, taken last week, shows piles of dirt near a newly excavated tunnel entrance at North Korea's nuclear test site. A summary of a South Korean intelligence report accompanying the photos, obtained by VOA says the excavation at the Punggye-ri test site is in its final stages.
Analysts say Pyongyang wants to demonstrate to the world that it is capable of carrying out a nuclear test at any time.
Meanwhile, North Korea, at a separate site, has placed on the launch pad what it is calling the Unha-3 rocket. It appears virtually identical to the three-stage liquid-fueled ballistic missile it fired over Japan three years ago.
The United States, South Korea, the European Union and Japan are condemning the planned launch, saying it will clearly violate United Nations sanctions forbidding Pyongyang from utilizing ballistic missile technology.
Jang Myong Jin, the general manager of the launch site, says North Korea has a sovereign right to carry out a space launch.
Speaking to correspondents taken to the launch site, Jang says, in recent talks between his government and U.S. officials, North Korea made clear that its moratorium pledge applied to long range missiles, but not satellites.
Senior research fellow Baek Seung-joo, at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis in Seoul, says Pyongyang's scientists have had a lot of time since their last attempt to put a satellite into space to greatly improve their ballistic missile capabilities.
Baek says North Korea, in the interim, has likely exchanged technology with Iran which has made three successful satellite launches. And, Baek says, the North Korean engineers seem to have a high level of confidence their third attempt will succeed.
Additional international sanctions were imposed on North Korea following its second missile launch and nuclear test in 2009.


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This route lies within a portion of the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail corridor. These spurs begin in Washington, D.C., and traverse both sides of the lower Potomac River in the Northern Neck of Virginia and southern Maryland until reaching the Chesapeake Bay. The route passes many points of interest and historic sites that are associated with George Washington and the early history of the U.S.A. A short spur through Washington, D.C. connects to the eastern terminus of the C & O Canal Towpath. A 25-mile spur in Virginia's Northern Neck leads to the Rappahannock River bridge and points southward.
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By Keph Senett
The piece of legislation, called la Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra, is intended to encourage a radical shift in conservation attitudes and actions, to enforce new control measures on industry, and to reduce environmental destruction.
The law redefines natural resources as blessings and confers the same rights to nature as to human beings, including: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered. Perhaps the most controversial point is the right "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities".
In late 2005 Bolivia elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Morales is an outspoken champion for environmental protection, petitioning for substantive change within his country and at the United Nations. Bolivia, one of South America's poorest countries, has long had to contend with the consequences of destructive industrial practices and climate change, but despite the best efforts of Morales and members of his administration, their concerns have largely been ignored at the UN.
Just last year, in 2010, Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca expressed his distress "about the inadequacy of the greenhouse gas reduction commitments made by developed countries in the Copenhagen Accord." His remarks were punctuated by the claim that some experts forecasted a temperature increase "as high as four degrees above pre-industrial levels." "The situation is serious," Choquehuanca asserted. "An increase of temperature of more than one degree above pre-industrial levels would result in the disappearance of our glaciers in the Andes, and the flooding of various islands and coastal zones."
In 2009, directly following the resolution of the General Assembly to designate April 22 "International Mother Earth Day", Morales addressed the press, stating "If we want to safeguard mankind, then we need to safeguard the planet. That is the next major task of the United Nations". A change to Bolivia's constitution in the same year resulted in an overhaul of the legal system – a shift from which this new law has sprung.
The Law of Mother Earth has as its foundation several of the tenets of indigenous belief, including that human are equal to all other entities. "Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family," Choquehuanca said. "We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values." The legislation will give the government new legal powers to monitor and control industry in the country.
"Existing laws are not strong enough," said Undarico Pinto, leader of the 3.5m-strong Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (a group that helped draft the law). "It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels."
Bolivia will be establishing a Ministry of Mother Earth, but beyond that there are few details about how the legislation will be implemented. What is clear is that Bolivia will have to balance these environmental imperatives against industries – like mining – that contribute to the country's GDP.
Bolivia's successes or failures with implementation may well inform the policies of countries around the world. "It's going to have huge resonance around the world," said Canadian activist Maude Barlow?. "It's going to start first with these southern countries trying to protect their land and their people from exploitation, but I think it will be grabbed onto by communities in our countries, for example, fighting the tarsands in Alberta."
Ecuador has enshrined similar aims in its Constitution, and is among the countries that have already shown support for the Bolivian initiative. Other include Nicaragua, Venezuela, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda.
National opposition to the law is not anticipated, as Morales' party – the Movement Towards Socialism – holds a majority in both houses of parliament. On April 20, two days before this year's "International Mother Earth Day", Morales will table a draft treaty with the UN, kicking off the debate with the international community.
Read the entire document (in Spanish) here.


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All ketchups are hardly created equal, as you'll see in our review of 42 different brands. Photo © Claudio Beldini |Fotolia.
Condiments Category Main Page Articles & Reviews
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STEPHANIE ZONIS is a Contributing Editor at THE NIBBLE.
October 2007 Updated November 2008
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Large-scale ketchup making begins with the selection of tomatoes. Enotes.com asserts that only tomatoes superior in color, flavor, texture and yield are used. Consistency is of great importance, too, as consumers want their ketchup to be the same, bottle after bottle. Tomatoes are harvested mechanically, graded, sorted, washed and chopped. They're precooked in stainless steel vats, a process called "scaling," which preserves them and eliminates any bacteria.
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Fetishes are an interesting phenomenon, you never know when something might peak your curiosity and strike you in a gratifying way. Rarely in life does an object instantly make you raise an eyebrow and re-imagine what turns you on, sexually or any other way. Little, if anything is known about this Handcuff watch by Luis Berumen dubbed "ZeroPointZero", but I believe he has successfully tapped into humanities deep fascination with possession and control. By incorporating a digital watch into a pair of handcuffs, he might be mockingly commenting on humanities futile desires to control the one thing in life we have no control over. The persistence of time is a cruel mistress and so is this watch.
Designer: Luis Berumen [ Via: TFTs & Gizmodo ]


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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- For three games, the San Jose Sharks have had more speed, discipline and depth than the Anaheim Ducks.
If they can repeat that formula for one more game, the Sharks will move onto the second round of the playoffs.
Joonas Donskoi scored one goal and set up another to start a four-goal barrage in the second period and the Sharks raced past Anaheim for the third straight game, beating the Ducks 8-1 on Monday night for a 3-0 series lead.
"We understand there's a lot of work to do," captain Joe Pavelski said. "Eliminating teams is always tough. That's kind of where our mindset shifts, I think. We'll see a few things that we can do better, and a few things we're doing well. That commitment from us is going to go a long way to stay with what we're doing."
Right now just about everything is working for the Sharks, who had eight goal-scorers in the highest-scoring playoff game in franchise history and got a 45-savve performance from Martin Jones.
San Jose used its superior speed to create odd-man rushes that paid off when Donskoi scored and then set up Marcus Sorensen in the opening four minutes of the second period and then turned the game into a laugher with four power-play goals after the Ducks spent most of their energy slashing and cross-checking.
"They can take as many of those as they want to, we'll take the power plays," coach Peter DeBoer said. "They take penalties, that's a fact. During the season they do and we anticipated that it would be like that in the playoffs and it has been. It's on us to make them pay for making those plays and decisions, and we have.
Eric Fehr and Tomas Hertl added goals later in the second to turn this all-California series into a rout. Logan Couture had a goal and two assists, Pavelski, Evander Kane and Timo Meier scored power-play goals in the third period, for the Sharks, who have outscored the Ducks 14-3 through the first three games of the first-round series.
San Jose will look to complete the sweep in Game 4 at home Wednesday night. Only four NHL teams have lost a best-of-seven series after winning the first three games with the Sharks the last to do it in 2014 in the first round against Los Angeles.
Rickard Rakell scored a power-play goal but the Ducks once again looked a step slow against the speedier Sharks. Anaheim has scored three goals all series, including just one at even strength.
John Gibson allowed five goals on 24 shots before being pulled after two periods. Ryan Miller allowed three power-play goals in the third.
"From my perspective it's hard to forget what we just did. Very undisciplined, very disappointed in our reaction in the hockey game," Ducks coach Randy Carlyle said. "Those are the things we have to address. We're not going to get yourself any kind of opportunity to take the number of penalties we took, and I call them selfish penalties."
The game turned early in the second after Brandon Montour fell near center ice, giving the Sharks a two on one. Donskoi converted on a give-and-go with Evander Kane and San Jose was off to the races.
Donskoi then set up the next goal on another odd-man rush when he fed Sorensen, who faked a forehand and then beat Gibson with a backhand on a similar move that led to goals for Kane and Couture in the first two games.
Jones then made a big stop on Rakell from the slot to preserve the two-goal lead and Fehr helped put the game away when he skated through two defenders and beat Gibson up high to make it 4-1.
Then the Ducks started their parade to the penalty box and the Sharks capitalized.
Fresh off the two wins in Anaheim, the Sharks were greeted by a frenzied crowd that sparked them to a fast start. Mikkel Boedker got things started when he used his speed to get around Hampus Lindholm and feed an open Couture in the slot for the tap-in into the open net.
Anaheim answered when Rakell got his first point of the series when he scored on a one-timer on the power play.
Game notes
D Andy Welinski was back in the lineup for the Ducks after being scratched in Game 2 for Kevin Bieksa. ... F Jason Chimera got his first action of the series for Anaheim in place of Antoine Vermette. ... Sharks C Joe Thornton, who has been out since Jan. 23 with a knee injury, took part in pregame warmups once again but isn't ready to play.
More AP hockey: www.apnews.com/tags/NHLhockey


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Scientists favour four ExoMars landing sites
3 April 2014
Some 60 scientists and engineers came together 26–28 March for the first ExoMars 2018 Landing Site Selection Workshop, held at ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid. Their task was to begin the process of drawing up a shortlist of the most suitable landing locations for ESA's first Mars rover.ExoMars, a joint endeavour between ESA and Russia's Roscosmos space agency, comprises two missions for launch to Mars: the Trace Gas Orbiter and an entry, descent and landing demonstrator module, Schiaparelli, to be launched in 2016; and the ExoMars Rover and Surface Platform scheduled for launch in May 2018, with touchdown on Mars expected in January 2019. The key driver behind the choice of landing site for the 2018 mission is the rover's search for evidence of Martian life, past or present.
A call for landing site proposals was issued last year by ESA and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, IKI (on behalf of Roscosmos). Eight proposals that were judged to be most appropriate to the mission's requirements were discussed during the recent workshop, and an initial shortlist of four favoured locations was drawn up at the end of the meeting (see below).
MOLA elevation map of Mars with the eight landing sites proposed for the ExoMars 2018 mission. Credit: ESA-Roscosmos/LSSWG/E. Hauber |
Scientific criteria
Present day Mars is a hostile place for living organisms - a frigid desert bathed in high doses of ultraviolet and ionising radiation. However, there is a possibility that primitive life may have gained a foothold when the climate was warmer and wetter, between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago.
Clearly, the ExoMars landing site should be an area of ancient rocks where liquid water was once abundant, preferably in a region that shows signs of sustained or frequently recurring aqueous activity, such as river channels and lakes.
On Earth, biosignatures can be found in fine-grained sedimentary rocks deposited by slow-moving water, for example, in alluvial plains or river deltas. Some of these rocks, such as clays, are very good at capturing and retaining organic compounds. Clay minerals are also evidence of sustained weathering by ground water of low acidity.
On the other hand, large doses of ionising radiation sterilise the surface and penetrate the Martian subsurface, contributing to the destruction of possible biosignatures. In order to find ancient biomarkers in a good state of preservation, the deposits containing them must have been buried for most of the planet's history and thus protected, until recently, from radiation damage.
ExoMars Rover. Credit: ESA |
One further complication is the covering of fine dust which blankets much of Mars. The ExoMars rover will search for molecular biosignatures by drilling into the subsurface, collecting samples and then analysing them in its onboard chemical laboratory. The vehicle can drill to a maximum depth of two metres, so the dust cover at each site should ideally be very thin or non-existent.
Time is of the essence if the maximum scientific return from ExoMars is to be achieved. The rover can cover a limited driving range in the course of its seven-month nominal surface exploration mission. The spacecraft's ballistic entry into the atmosphere is a rather imprecise procedure which means that it could land anywhere within a 104 km x 19 km ellipse. In order to ensure that the rover spends as much time as possible conducting scientific research, a landing ellipse should contain a scattering of suitable sites to ensure that at least some of them are accessible to the rover.
In addition to these scientific requirements, the use of parachutes to slow the spacecraft's descent restricts the landing sites that can be chosen. In particular, candidate sites must all lie at least two kilometres beneath the mean planetary reference level – the Martian equivalent of sea level. This is to ensure that the spacecraft can fly through a sufficiently long atmospheric trajectory for its parachute system to operate properly.
Other important engineering constraints include surface gradients, which if too steep could fool the descent module's radar, the size and distribution of rocks that may topple or damage the lander, and wind speed.
The candidate sites
The workshop attendees favoured four candidate sites – all of which are located relatively near the equator - that were considered to be the most likely to achieve the mission's objectives. They are: Mawrth Vallis (for which 2, very similar, proposals were received), Oxia Planum, Hypanis Vallis and Aram Dorsum (referred to as Oxia Palus in earlier reports).
The four sites favoured by scientists at the first Landing Site Selection Workshop. Credit: ESA-Roscosmos/LSSWG/D. Loizeau |
The area around Mawrth Vallis and nearby Oxia Planum contains one of the largest exposures of ancient, clay-rich rocks on the planet. Both regions contain rock types that may have been favourable for complex organic chemistry, and layered rocks that may preserve evidence of past life. Also, some of these deposits seem to have been exhumed within the last few hundred million years, thus reducing their exposure to radiation.
The other two sites represent former fluvial environments. Hypanis Vallis is characterised by fine-grained sedimentary rocks associated with an ancient delta located at the end of a major valley network. Aram Dorsum is a region of sedimentary rocks that was buried by impact ejecta and other deposits and has only been exhumed relatively recently.
Over the next few months, members of the ExoMars Landing Site Selection Working Group (LSSWG) will seek to improve their understanding of the scientific and engineering implications associated with each of these four locations, while also devoting some attention to the three remaining sites - Coogoon Valles, Simud Vallis and Southern Isidis.
The LSSWG will then recommend a final shortlist of up to four candidate sites in June 2014, prior to a more detailed analysis. The aim is to complete the certification of at least one landing site for the ExoMars rover by the second half of 2016. The final decision on the landing site will be taken sometime in 2017.
For further information, please contact:
Jorge Vago
Scientific Support Office
Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration,
ESA, The Netherlands
Email: Jorge.Vagoesa.int
Tel: +31-71-565-5211
Editor's note: this text was updated in September 2014 to reflect the change in name of the site previously referred to in this article as Oxia Palus. The site will in future be referred to as Aram Dorsum.


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LeeAnn Srogi
Department of Geology and Astronomy, West Chester University
HomepageWhat are the key issues related to the role of the affective domain in teaching geoscience that you would like to engage at the workshop?
- What learning goals for our students lie within the affective domain? How should this shape how and what we teach? In general, what are some best practices for having students learn about learning and the affective domain? Are there ways that teaching faculty could/should partner with staff in Student Affairs to meet institutional educational objectives?
- Hierarchical taxonomies of educational objectives, such as that by Krathwohl and others for the affective domain, can easily be viewed as benchmarks for personal development - is this a misinterpretation? What do we really mean by a taxonomy of objectives and how do we implement them appropriately in teaching? Are the elements of the affective domain really hierarchical, as formulated by Krathwohl or others? If yes, then what is the nature of this hierarchy? How can we use or teach about a hierarchy in ways that are respectful of all students and that do not lead to status issues among students?
- How separate are the cognitive and affective domains? Do we discuss two domains because they are a convenient construct to organize knowledge of human psychology, or are there fundamental differences? If they are truly separate, to what extent are the cognitive and affective domains connected? Is it beneficial to create and strengthen connections, and if so, what are some best practices for student learning?
- To what extent is it necessary to incorporate the affective domain within assessments of student learning? What are some best practices for assessment of the affective domain? How do we conduct research on the affective domain and student learning?
- What role is played by human attitudes and values, both in living on earth and in learning about the earth? What frameworks exist, or can be created, for analyzing people's attitudes and values about the earth? How do student attitudes and values about the earth shape their reception of our geoscience courses, their interest in geoscience, and their sense of responsibility toward the earth?
- When we discuss issues of motivation in the workshop, I would like to consider recruitment of students into geoscience courses and majors, as well.
I have some background in cooperative learning (CL), having both taken and helped to facilitate 4-day workshops on cooperative learning led by an international expert in the field (and WCU colleague in the College of Education), Dr. Lynda Baloche. Lynda and I prepared an article for the Teaching Mineralogy workshop volume, and we are in the process of updating this article. I will upload the revised version, with an updated bibliography, to the SERC website before the workshop in February. I have led sessions on CL at previous workshops with varying success, but I have a plan for an introduction to the essential elements of CL in a 60-minute format. Given the workshop topic, people may be very familiar with cooperative learning and may not be interested in such a session, but I would be willing to facilitate one if desired. Also, I have begun to assess the role of cooperative identification exams in my mineralogy course in achieving cognitive and affective domain objectives (please see my essay for more information). I started with an informal student survey of behaviors and reflection in fall 2004, developed some emergent themes from the results, and consulted with colleagues in social psychology and educational measurement to develop more extensive surveys administered in fall 2005. I was particularly interested in how interacting during studying was different from interacting while taking the cooperative exams, and whether and how the cooperative exams contributed to the students' knowledge, confidence, and the learning environment. I would like to share my results so far, and discuss how to assess the affective domain goals when we assess student learning.
At GSA this October, Dr. Tim Lutz (a colleague in the geology/astronomy department at WCU) and I presented a poster describing how we incorporate some aspects of the affective domain into introductory-level, general education courses. We have adapted a values framework by Stephen Kellert to help students develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which people perceive, interact with, and value the natural world. In an interdisciplinary environmental course (Lutz), the values framework helps students see "hidden" values and provides counterbalance and alternatives to the prevailing economic viewpoint. For example, students understand cost-benefit analysis to justify resource development (utilitarian value of Kellert). However, people living near the resource may argue that the inherent sanctity of the land and ecosystem (moralistic value), the beauty of the land (aesthetic value), or the connection of their community with the land/ecosystem (humanistic value) must be accounted for and may outweigh economic benefits. In a course on volcanoes (Srogi), Kellert's values provide a vocabulary and schema to analyze attitudes of people living with geological hazards. Students also use the values framework to evaluate the effectiveness of hazard mitigation and evacuation strategies. In a final essay, students express how working with the values framework deepens their understanding of human responses to the natural world and its hazards. The poster has been uploaded to the GSA website (http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2006AM/finalprogram/abstract_114580.htm), and I can bring a version to share in the workshop, along with Kellert's book. I can also bring excerpts of the student essays for analysis of students' attitudes about nature, natural hazards, and geoscience.
Stephen Kellert (1996) The Value of Life. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Essay: Cooperative Learning and Institutional Goals for Student Development
The affective domain is critical in defining institutional-level goals for student development. The Assistant VP for Student Affairs at my university listed our goals as: Intellectual Development (reasoning, critical thinking); Identity Development (autonomy, integrity, sense of self); Interpersonal Development (socialization, respecting others); Values Development (role in society, acts based on values, respecting rights of others). How I teach is an important part of meeting my university's goals. Research in cooperative learning (e.g., Johnson et al., 1996) indicates that positive peer relationships are essential to success in school and help students learn, that isolation and alienation are predictors of failure; thus, cooperative interaction connects the affective and cognitive domains.
I have been using cooperative exams for mineral identification since 1991, and began to survey students to assess the cooperative exams in 2004-05. Cooperative exams are more than "can you identify the correct mineral." By emphasizing diagnostic properties and hypothesis testing, exams help build skills in critical thinking and reasoning from evidence. Students must defend their observations and conclusions to their peers, and develop confidence in their process of identification. Cooperative exams promote a positive learning environment as students work together, learning to listen to and respect others' opinions. The "no mooching" policy helps students toward the recognition that it's not about what others can provide them, but what learning can be achieved for all when everyone participates. Cooperative exam goals related to the affective domain include: that students will increase knowledge sharing, build community, gain insight into what they know and how they know it, and develop confidence and a sense of personal authority about their knowledge. Preliminary results from the quantitative data show that cooperation during the exam is important: students test mineral properties, listen to others' ideas, ask questions, and propose their own ideas more during the cooperative exam than when studying together. They report greater confidence in knowledge, inquiry, and communication when they take the exam together, particularly in justifying their ideas with evidence. Students' responses to open-ended questions are more variable. I plan to analyze the responses using a framework related to the affective domain (e.g., Krathwohl et al., 1964), and hope to share results at the workshop, and discuss methods of assessing goals in the affective domain.
Although not rigorously assessed, I find that an identification activity with assigned roles is key to building positive interdependence among students before the exams. I observe students' behaviors in the first week and then assign groups and a specific role to each group member for the mineral identification activity. The people who did not handle the materials or speak out much initially become the tester/presenters, actively testing the mineral properties and then reporting out to the class. The people who were most active and vocal become the recorders, and practice listening to the testers and the fact-checkers. In semesters when I did NOT structure these activities and assign roles, it seemed to take longer for equitable participation in the groups to become established, such as sharing materials, listening to all viewpoints, and soliciting and answering questions. Used judiciously, more structured learning activities may have benefits for student learning goals in the affective domain.
Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B.S., & Masia, B.B. (1964) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook II: Affective Domain. New York: David McKay Company, Inc.
Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., and Smith, K.A. (1998) Cooperative learning returns to college. Change, vol. 30, p. 26-35.


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The LispWorks profiler provides a way of empirically monitoring execution characteristics of Lisp programs. The data obtained can help to improve the efficiency of a Lisp program by highlighting those procedures which are commonly used or particularly slow, and which would therefore benefit from optimization effort.
For complete details of the functions and symbols introduced in this chapter, see the LispWorks Reference Manual .


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With July 4th behind us, it's officially summer and time to think about your outdoor lighting needs. Here are some of our favorite products to light the night!
Anytime you're outside in the summer, there's one thing that's sure to ruin it: bugs. The problem tends to be worse at night because traditional lights attract them.
Most people are so used to seeing bugs on their outdoor lights they've never wondered why, or how to stop them. Insects see light differently than people do, and they're most attracted to shorter wavelengths—light at the far end of the spectrum, close to ultraviolet light. So all too often, the most attractive light in the area will be the manmade outdoor light around your deck, porch or patio.
Bug lights use filtered yellow glass to minimize the short spectrum light—so they don't attract insects. If you haven't yet, this summer is the time to switch.
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Energy Efficiency | Expert Lighting Tips | Light Bulbs
For decades, choosing a light bulb was a fairly simple task. We didn't have all these choices we now have today. Wattage meant brightness and we didn't have to worry about dimmer compatibility.
Yes, there is a lot of new products and information out there now, but that's okay. Change is good.
These new products can help us save energy, money and the planet through innovative, lower-wattage, long-life products that don't produce nearly as much pollution during the manufacturing process as older types of lighting.
Products such as CFLs and LEDs will help to reduce your energy bills, labor costs and even HVAC related costs. And as a Property Manager -of one location or many- that can make all the difference.
Phased-out bulbs, new efficiency standards, updated packaging labels and LED improvements over the last few years have presented some challenges, but they have also opened up a number of opportunities.
Whether you're upgrading for the first time from incandescent to CFLs or you're making the move to LEDs, here are some things you should keep in mind.
Tags: CFL bulbs, compact fluorescent light bulbs, dimmable, comparison, energy efficient, energy efficiency, EISA, fluorescent, green, green lighting, halogen incandescent, incandescent, L Prize, LED, LED bulbs, Lighting, Phase-out, tips, unique lighting
The beginning of 2012 marked a change in the way we thing about lighting. Earlier this year, The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 outlined new regulations to phase-out inefficient incandescent general service bulbs over a four-year period-in California this started a year earlier in 2011.
The phase-out process began with the 100 watt incandescent in January of this year and will be followed by the 75 watt in 2013 and the 60 watt and 40 watt incandescents in 2014. Fortunately, there are many replacement options available that provide the same quality of light but meet the new standards and you can learn more about them in the Bulbs.com Learning Center under Incandescent Phase-out.
Following the incandescent bulb phase-out, PAR Halogen and Reflector lamps will begin their own phase-out starting on July 14, 2012. To be compliant with EISA's energy efficient standards and a ruling by the Department of Energy in 2009, any parabolic aluminized reflector (PAR) or reflector bulb that is 40 watts of higher can no longer be manufactured for use in the United States. This includes PAR38, PAR30 (short and long-necked), BR30, BR40 and R20 halogen lamps. These bulbs are extremely popular with businesses and homeowners, so we have increased our inventory to meet the needs of customers during the transition period. However, as inventory supplies are depleted in the marketplace, the time will come to look at replacement options.
Tags: CFL, CFL bulbs, halogen incandescent, halogen, green lighting, energy efficiency, EISA, compact fluorescent light bulbs, incandescent, incandescent ban, LED
General | Lighting Phase-outs & Regulations
Much like our recent blog post about the different types of lighting for the hospitality industry, the retail industry requires just as much attention when it comes to the products you sell and the environment you are creating for your customer.
It's safe to say that just about every manager or business owner is looking for ways to save. Energy costs from HVAC and lighting are no exception. The most common options are energy saving compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and LEDs. Both can produce quality light with the CRI needed for retail locations.
In the past, CFLs did not perform as well as they do today. Light quality, color temperature and average rated life of the bulb have all made significant improvements over the years. Still, it is a wise choice to purchase a reputable brand as there are some very inexpensive CFLs that often fail to meet their claim. Here is a great post if you would like to delve deeper into CFLs as an option. There are even dimmable options for spiral CFLs and CFL reflectors. Tip: Speak with one of our Lighting Specialists as some lighting controls (dimmers, occupancy sensors) are not always compatible with dimmable CFL lamps. Additionally, if you are currently using a large quantity of halogen lamps to light your space, CFLs are a great solution as they produce very little heat.
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Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps (CCFLs) have been around for about five years, but don't get the consideration they often deserve. They have more than double the life of standard Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) and are better incandescent bulb replacements for dimming and flashing applications.
CCFL and CFL technologies are very similar - they both use integrated ballasts to regulate electrical current into a glass tube to excite mercury and phosphors and make UV light. The biggest differences between the two technologies are the type, temp, and resiliency of the cathodes used at the ends of the glass tubes. Standard CFL cathodes incorporate a thin tungsten wire that gets to 900°F while CCFL cathodes are more like solid metal thimbles that peak around 200°F (a "cold" cathode, relatively speaking.) Because the CCFL cathodes are more durable, they can be hit with more voltage (about 5 X) more often than standard CFLs and that opens up opportunities to use CCFL in applications where CFL products consistently fail. More...
Tags: cold cathode, CFL bulbs, dimmable, flashable, energy efficient, green
If you were disappointed by the performance of CFL bulbs in the last few years, it's time to try again.
Though we call them light bulbs, traditional incandescent bulbs are actually small heaters that give off a little bit of light - something you know if you've ever touched a bulb that's been on for a while. These bulbs were technological wonders when they were patented in 1880, but today they are inefficient dinosaurs. They waste energy and money, and they are responsible for millions of tons of pollution that contribute to global warming.
The next generation of Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) now give off higher-quality light while still using a fraction of the electricity as their earlier predecessors. Using CFLs puts less strain on the electric grid and saves you money. CFLs also reduce air pollution and the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming buy using less energy: if every household in the country replaced just three 60-watt incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, we would reduce as much pollution as if we took 3.5 million cars off the roads! More...
Tags: compact fluorescent light bulbs, energy efficient, CFL bulbs